10 Real Life Happy Endings That Became Disturbing Movies

An adaptation of actress Christina Crawford’s 1978 memoir about her violent and alcoholic adoptive mother, film star Joan Crawford, and the beatings, humiliations and abuse she and her brother Christopher suffered at Crawford’s hands.

Famously garish and camp, Mommie Dearest features one of the all-time-great unhinged performances from Faye Dunaway as the supposedly monstrous Joan, and the film’s title has become pop culture shorthand for the trope of the awful, overbearing mother figure.

There are some significant differences of opinion amongst the Crawford family and Joan’s friends as to how exaggerated the memoir was. However, it appears that the movie may have exaggerated the memoir still further, to the point of parody - viewed as unintentionally hilarious, Mommie Dearest won the Golden Raspberry award for Worst Movie upon release.

The film ends with Christina and Christopher being cut out of Joan’s will, and Christina determining that her mother won’t have the last word. Well, if you count the book and then the film as providing that ‘last word’ on behalf of Joan’s apparent victims, then that’s true.

However, Christina Crawford went on to have a fulfilled, happy life, going back to school after quitting acting to obtain a master’s degree prior to her mother’s passing in 1977 and entering the oil industry at the executive level… finally free of her mother’s malign influence.

If the best revenge is living well, then by the time the movie Mommie Dearest came out, Christina was living very well indeed.